Dividing Lines – Their Advice and Gentle Chiding Is Much Appreciated
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DIVIDING Russell Hargrave LINES 2014 Asylum, the media and some reasons for (cautious) optimism 1 © Asylum Aid About Asylum Aid Asylum Aid is an independent, national charity working to secure protection for people seeking refuge in the UK from persecution and human rights abuses abroad. In the last two decades we have provided legal advice to more than 30,000 asylum seekers and refugees, many of whom have fled persecution and torture in the most dangerous countries in the world. This frontline experience helps inform our policy work, so that we campaign effectively at the heart of government. www.asylumaid.org.uk @asylumaid Acknowledgments There is nothing pleasanter than exchanging ideas and arguments with friends and colleagues. I owe a substantial debt to everyone who read through early drafts of Dividing Lines – their advice and gentle chiding is much appreciated. Carys Davis, founder of The Other Place Public Affairs Tim Finch, Director of Communication, Institute of Public Policy Research Anita Hurrell, Policy Officer, Corum Children’s Legal Centre Sunder Katwala, Director, British Future Debora Singer, Policy and Research Manager, Asylum Aid It goes without saying, nonetheless, that any errors of fact or tone remain mine and mine alone. I owe a still greater debt to Ingrid Abreu Scherer, who has provided wise counsel throughout. PREFACE “Do you have any asylum seekers?” Sometimes, a single phone call focuses the mind. It may not have been communications work at its best, but it was illustrative. She wanted ‘asylum’ to At the end of 2011, I spoke with a BBC researcher, mean borders, government screw-ups, and the threat who explained that she had some questions to ask of illegal migration. I wanted it to mean people fleeing about asylum seekers coming to the UK. torture and violence, and getting a fair hearing in the UK if they asked for help. If there was common This is about as broad an inquiry as I can be faced ground, we didn’t find it. (The programme eventually with, but it soon became clear that her query was went ahead as part of Radio 4’s The Report series in fact about border control. The BBC had obtained in December 2011, without featuring any asylum or some internal Home Office memos about the so- immigration advocates). called ‘Lille loophole’, via which someone who wants to avoid passport control can travel by train through It was a gloomy few minutes which gave me pause the Schengen area to Lille and then on into the UK for thought. How representative had this exchange without any checks. Radio 4 was interested in running been? Have journalists generally made up their something. Did we “have any asylum seekers” who minds about asylum seekers and refugees? Is there had come into the country this way? Did we want to a gulf of understanding between us? comment? Or maybe these questions under-estimate the Well, I explained, yes and no. Asylum Aid is a charity potential of both asylum charities and journalists. Are which gives legal advice to asylum seekers and opinions really so fixed that we can’t get a fair hearing, refugees every day. We might have clients who or is the media perfectly amenable to positive asylum could speak with her, and we’re always happy to talk stories provided they are packaged up in a way that about asylum. The current system is an adversarial, best suits journalists and editors? And if the latter: undignified and inefficient mess for many of the what does that ‘package’ look like? people flung into it, and some of their stories would articulate that. It would be great to air some ideas. What is Dividing Lines trying to achieve? But, I continued, it didn’t sound as if the BBC was I want to look properly at these questions. And in so doing, actually planning a piece about asylum, but rather I wanted to introduce some cautious optimism back into something about border control and European the world of asylum and media work. relations, with asylum seekers plonked in the middle as a symbol of the problem. Nothing wrong with Yes, the media onslaught against asylum seekers at the talking about border control, but I couldn’t in good turn of the 1990s and 2000s was sustained and brutal. We faith put up clients and experts on asylum if that was have a particularly grim array of headlines to look back on. the line they were taking. Asylum seekers were “AIDS-infected … overwhelming our hospitals” according to the Telegraph in 2003; “the There was a longish silence (partly, I admit, because asylum shambles is the sea in which terror most easily my answer may have been a bit wordy). The researcher swims” warned the Daily Mail the same year. eventually replied that asylum was an aspect of illegal migration in which listeners were extremely interested. During this period, roughly a decade ago now, media and But there is nothing illegal about claiming asylum, I politicians engaged not so much in a race to the bottom insisted, getting a bit shrill. This is precisely the sort of as a crash to the basement. I analyse what happened misapprehension I spend my days trying to dispel. and why in Chapters One and Two, and consider some of the implications of this. Another silence. I can’t remember how the call ended, except that it was without much further discussion Some parts of this story are relatively well known. and with both of us rather grumpier than we had been My assessment of this period draws on new articles five minutes earlier. and reports from the time, and is complemented by 3 two recent academic studies, the book Bad News My conclusion considers the barriers to making this for Refugees and the Migration Observatory’s report happen, and how new and existing resources might Migration in the News. Both track the trends and be directed to help. language-use in media coverage of asylum issues. Audiences large and small Nonetheless, something is missing from such analysis, We shouldn’t overlook the contribution of liberal- something I try to capture in Chapter Three. leaning (and lower-circulation) publications which have hosted detailed asylum rights stories for many years. While media coverage today on immigration remains The excellent, provocative Red Pepper magazine extremely tough, things have changed in subtle but springs to mind. The London Review of Books has important ways. There are still terrible asylum stories. published excellent long-form essays on the perils But it simply isn’t 2003 anymore. There are fewer anti- of migration into Europe. Among the broadsheets, asylum stories than there were ten years ago. In the the Guardian and Independent have long been more samples used by Bad News for Refugees, the number willing to take a progressive line on immigration and of asylum stories in the mainstream press dropped asylum (something which has helped preserve their from 1,961 in 2006 to 1,351 in 2011, and down to 821 standing on the liberal left). I take it as self-evident, for the first eight months of 2012. In six years, the though, that we could and should be aiming to reach number of asylum stories has dropped by half.1 this traditional audience and far beyond, targeting precisely the mass audience that only the mainstream There is far less heat in the issue than there once press can command. This includes those titles which was. Asylum is the moral panic of a different time, have long served-up anti-asylum stories. one done to death ten years ago. Like salmonella scares or tales of catching AIDS from drinking water, If that sounds controversial, I would refer people to no editor wants to trot out something which feels like Chapter Three for evidence that those papers and old news. their readers already happily engage with positive coverage of asylum matters where a great story piques I have heard it argued that our experience now is just the editors’ interest. That door is already ajar. Our the low point of a wave natural to media production: most pressing task is not to bemoan anti-asylum fare. the peak of 2002 or so has led to a relative trough It is to understand why horror stories have enjoyed today, but we should expect the wave to climb upwards such coverage in the past, and serve up alternative, again shortly. I’m not sure that this is true, but even if progressive ideas which might enjoy traction with the we agree this seems another strong argument to act. same editors. Let’s strike while negative coverage is in that trough. It might slow the upward turn, squeeze out space And this, I now realise, is how, in a perfect world, that for anti-asylum stories. It might arrest the upward conversation with the BBC researcher would have turn altogether. I’m not sure what we have to gain gone. No, I didn’t have anyone willing to take part in the from shrugging our shoulders and just waiting for the broadcast. OK, the BBC is going to run it anyway. But media narrative to take its course. hold on a moment, because here is something irresistible I have worked up, something much better which you Chapter Three argues that, with the worst of the media should start scheduling for next week, and which will coverage behind us, we are in danger of missing some swallow up any room for anti-asylum stories... important facts. Firstly, public support for refugees and for the principle of asylum has endured, despite the whole concept getting a pounding for the last decade.